Yangon Photos


After over three months of traveling together, Sam and I finally had to part ways, a very sad day. Sam headed to the Philippines to spend Christmas and New Years with her girlfriend while I headed to Myanmar to experience what I thought was a largely undiscovered country. The first sign I was wrong Myanmar's status was when there was a line out the door at the embassy in Bangkok to apply for visas. After landing in Yangon, the realization continued when I had to walk around to quite a few hotels before finding one with a vacant bed. It seems that tourism has accelerated in recent years and the hotels haven't caught up yet. During my time here, it seemed like every room in the country was booked every night. There were even people sleeping in the halls at two of the guest houses I visited. I met a great group of people that were headed to Inle Lake, so I left Yangon with them the very next day.

I was surprised to hear my taxi driver bring up politics, but he said that it was safe to talk in the car, just not in public places. The lights at the airport went out after I arrived and all the streetlights were also dark during the drive into town. The driver said that blackouts were less common lately and that the situation int he country in general had been improving recently.

One of the things that's unique about Myanmar is that some of the women wear a thin coat of pain on their cheeks, supposedly to protect against the sun. Another unique feature we discovered was treturous bridge construction using pipes welded on top of the walking surface. These strang pipes combined with the fact that the city was a black hole without streetlights, resulted in my Finnish friend, Olli getting a severly bruised foot on our first night in the country.